A pleasant surprise

Day 43
Mesquite NV

Go ahead and be jealous. Not everyone gets to wake up and look at other RV's in the morning. This place feels cozy and many of the neighbors are out chit chatting with one another. Let's go ahead and spend another day here. The casino is cool with us hanging around for 72 hours and we really have no place to be. Eli jumps into the back of Shriley and we buzz a mile down the road to a walking path. Time to get our morning steps in. 

I'm bored. What's next? Tripadvisor says that there is a free museum in town. I like free. T-dub gets unloaded from her rack and we don our riding gear to go see the town. What we got was an unexpected surprise.

The museum folks were especially friendly. One of the lovely ladies behind the desk walked up to us after a few minutes with another curator. She just sat down in front of a spinning machine and started making thread out of cotton. All the while explaining the process and town history to us. It was a really nice invitation into the workings of the old town. After that we kept meandering through the building to look at some more stuff.

The first Curator came out and started to talk with us once more. We finally made introductions and Val seemed just as happy as could be. Stories of the cotton plants in the back yard gave us a little more in depth look at the thread we had just seen be made. 

The conversation turned to the Pomegranate bush behind us and our visit ended with some fresh fruit right from the source. A little gem of a museum right in the middle of town. Turned out to be a really cool place for some out of town visitors.

We go back home for lunch and I conjure up another scheme. Val from the museum had talked about some local attractions down an old oil drilling road. He said the road was rough going and we shouldn't take anything nice. T-dub just so happens to be sitting outside and we get ready to roll out. After 18 miles of the most pot holed "road" I've ever seen, we end up at Whitney Pockets. An out of place hunk of rock with a bunch of smooth holes in it.

Whitney Pockets also has an old make shift dam. I can only presume it was to hold back water for the drilling operation that ceased to exist years ago.

Just a couple of more miles south is a big sinkhole known around here as devil's throat. Val told us back at the museum that when he was a kid they use to walk inside of it. At that time it was only about waist deep, and really wasn't much to see. Over the years it has continued to collapse and the BLM even put up a fence with a stern warning. Stay out or you could die in a collapse.

I can't see the hole from here. I would think that if they really wanted people to stay out the fence would have been built a bit taller. Seems like it's more for the kiddos.

Probably a good 75 to 100 feet deep.

The day is getting late and we have 21 more miles of tough riding ahead of us. The road had went from ridiculously pot holed broken pavement to gravel and sand river washes filled with rocks the size of soccer balls. T-dub earned her keep today. We get the snot beat out of us for an hour on our drive back home. I swing by the gas station and top off the tank. Verdict: 79 miles on 1.015 gallons. Not too shabby little bike. Not too shabby at all. Time to take Eli down the Casino back alley and past a poor looking old dog who's been locked in a cage for many years. Our old boy doesn't know just how good he has it.